I recently finished reading this Hunter S. Thompson “oral history” I found at the thrift store a few years ago, GONZO, and the whole time I was like, how was this man not an Aries? The arrogance! The pure unadulterated ambition! The total and complete selfishness! The idiotic stubbornness! I mean, his “character” was relatable in an eerie kind of “evil twin” way. I kept thinking to myself, dude sounds exactly like if me (Aries) and my abusive ex (extremely Pisces) were the same person. The paranoia, the watery moods, the fucking apocalyptic meltdowns, the dragging of everyone around you down into yr own mostly self-created pit of despair and rage. The unrelenting desire to drive drunk directly into a brick wall, basically. It all felt uncannily familiar! So finally, just for laughs, I looked up his natal chart… and apparently, that motherfucker was an Aries rising. ONE DEGREE away from Pisces! :v I keep saying I’m a skeptic who is just here for the memes but this is ridiculous lmao
Another thing I found personally disorienting is that the book didn’t include anything about Hunter S. Thompson and “STET.” Stet is a Latin word meaning “let it stand,” and it’s used in proofreading to say that a word or phrase that was crossed out should stay the same. I got it tattooed on my knuckles on my 30th birthday for reasons unrelated to HST, however, it has always been my understanding that I first learned that word ages ago, when I’d heard or read somewhere that he used to send his edited manuscripts back to Jann Wenner or whoever, all marked up with STETs as he constantly fought with editors over proofreading decisions. In my memory I feel like this is something I learned? absorbed? imagined?? back when I was like 18 or 20ish, and it’s always been this minor detail that took on mythic proportions – I mean, the story definitely appeals to my own distaste for editing ~muh work~ – but I guess it’s just part of my own personal apocrypha, because I cannot even find a damn thing about it online. Could it have been some other tortured white male author? HMM. Love 2 b my own unreliable narrator I guess!
It’s the more-or-less true story of one weekend when Hunter (called “Raoul Duke” in the book) and his lawyer Oscar Acosta (called “Dr. Gonzo" in the book) go to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle raceforSports Illustrated.
And?
And lots of drugs. They spend the entire narrative hopped up on pretty much every drug available in 1971 that you can think of. One of the running jokes is that the reality of the violently superficial Las Vegas nightlife is much worse than any twisted visions their drug binge can produce.
What about the bats?
If you’ve read Game of Thrones and you think Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas has too many non-existent animals flying around overhead, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
I smell the death of the American Dream. Again.
Yes, but at least Thompson is good enough to explicitly tell you in the middle of the book that this is why he wrote the book.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“After finishing the book, I walked at a 30-degree angle for two days.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“This book glorifies drug use.”
Should I actually read it?
Yes. It’s no exaggeration to say that Hunter S. Thompson more or less invented a whole new school of journalism with this one book (and an article about the Kentucky Derby he wrote before). Also, it’s very funny.
I would invite Varg, Euronymous and Dead just to listen to them bicker.
I hope I can magickally understand them tho, because my Swedish isn’t -that great, and my Norwegian is near to nonexistent.
I’d probably serve sushi at this dinner just to see if they can figure it out. I’m sure at some point Varg’s chopsticks will need to be taken from him, lest he try to stick them in Euro’s eyesockets and lobotomise him like that guy did in Session 9.
Dead would eat the sushi, not because he necessarily liked it, but because he’d hope eating something raw would gross the other two out.
I’d invite Sarah Kane (playwright), Rachel McKibbens (performance poet) and Jonna Lee (swedish musician) to a whiskey and Pictionary party because, odd and interesting as they are, they’d have the strangest ways of drawing things I’m sure. Also, when drunk later we could get into heated discussions about anything and everything, Kane brings the intellectual viscosity, McKibbens the emotional sucker-punch and Lee the creative originality. One would leave inspired for life.
Let me know if I missed anyone’s responses. Sometimes reblogs fail to show up in the notes, or messages are not received.
Photo: A garden party given by Governor Rawson for the Officers of the American Fleet at Cranbrook, Sydney, 1908.
“The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. “ -Hunter S. Thompson
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.
Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…
Bruce Robinson came out of hiding to direct it, and I consider Withnail And I to be unimpeachable.
Random IMDB Trivia:
The final black and white still shot (also the cover photo of the book) at the very end of the movie is not in Puerto Rico (where the movie takes place) but in Aruba. The author is shown sitting on a bench at the Aruba Palm Beach Club (with a bottle of Amstel beer). In the background is the Aruba Caribbean Hotel, the first resort hotel to be constructed on Palm Beach. The author visited Aruba while living in Puerto Rico.
Netflix Rating: 4 out of 5
1 Thing I Liked About It: The club scene with Amber Heard. Great old surfer music, great dancing.
1 Thing I Didn’t Like About It: The moral message seemed a bit murky. Some departures from the book. Aaron Eckhart’s character was thin.
Jim and Artie Mitchell’s Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die(1988)
The Mitchell Brothers, the San Francisco pornographers who made Behind the Green Door (1973), made this 30-minute documentary about the famed New Journalist. You get to see the great writer mumbling some jabs at Reagan in front of appreciative audiences, firing guns, jittering around the office, golfing, and hanging out with naked girls (oh, those Mitchells!). He predicts that Reagan’s presidency will devolve into a scandal “much worse that Watergate,” but I guess hindsight is 20/20. He also trashes Garry Trudeau (“that filthy little animal!”), who turned Thompson into “Uncle Duke” in his Doonesbury comic strip. Bon mots like “Almost all politicians and lawyers should be castrated so their genes don’t pass along” seem fairly thin sauce from the social satirist and prose stylist behind Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Maybe the crazy never die, but they sure do fade away.*
*(Well, except in the case of poor Artie Mitchell, who became a hopeless cocaine addict and was shot to death in 1991 by Jim, who claimed self-defense. Jim Mitchell served three years in San Quentin, and went back to running the brothers’ famous O'Farrell Theatre, which I bet was pretty gloomy by that time. He died in 2007. You can see his side of the story in Emilio Estevez’s Rated X, starring Estevez as Jim and Charlie Sheen as Artie).
